Halliburton Spinoff KBR Made $39.5 Billion from the Iraq War

Cheney and Rumsfeld, Image via NPR 

When Dick Cheney and his henchman moved into the White House in 2001, they ignored warnings of Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US. They told terrorist experts to shut up. Cheney was supposed to have meetings on the subject, but didn't. John Ashcroft told agents investigating the possible attacks to get out of his office and not come back with such stuff.

Instead, almost from day one, they were focused on Iraq. The PNAC had famously said they would need a "Pearl Harbor" type event to intervene and rebuild the Middle East into a Freshwater "Free" Market Utopia. And just hours after they got their "event," Donald Rumsfeld was ordering his aides to come up with a plan to attack Iraq.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

The twin towers were steaming piles of rubble and body parts. The Pentagon was still smoldering. Rumsfeld knew of intel pointing to Al Qaeda. And what did he do? He ordered plans for an attack on Iraq.

I've spent far too many hours of my life thinking about the reasons that Rummy and Cheney were so obsessed with Iraq. They had grudges. They truly believed their own BS. They wanted to finish what they thought was unfinished business. But after years of contemplating, and thinking that all these reasons played a part, one old standard for political reasoning still stands out: follow the money.

Dick Cheney's Halliburton spinoff, KBR received more money from the Iraq war than any other contractor.

The company was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.

 That $39.5 billion to KBR was almost triple what the number two and three highest paid Iraq War contractors got. KBR received over 28% of the $138 billion in taxpayer funds spent on the war. And corruption and profit sucked as much as 60% right into the pockets of the war profiteers.

According to the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of corruption by defense contractors may be as high as $60 billion.

Cheney calls Iraq War a success. Image via Crooks and Liars.

Cheney's stock options and deferred salary from Halliburton amounted to direct payments to the warmonger for moving from private business into a government position from which he could send no-bid contracts to the his former company. This gigantic payoff for starting the war might be one of the biggest cons ever conducted on the American taxpayer.

Despite his obvious corruption, disregard for truth, law, and basic human dignity, people still listen to what he says--his opinion is still treated as worthy of attention by a frighteningly large segment of the American public, many of whom also profited from the war.

Taken together, the Iraq war and the housing crash are ample proof that the neo-con and supply side hucksters have figured out that the key to getting away with the largest crimes in human history is to go massive.

Anyone Still A Republican After Today is Officially a Fucking Idiot

Sarah Fucking Palin:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

The America I know and love doesn't exist anymore. If it did, lying scumbag idiot torture apologists who promote the agenda of racist violence whores who respond to collateral damage with shrugs and smirks would be rounded up and jailed, when a conviction was achieved from a Jury of their peers (if there is such a thing), and sued for slander when a conviction is not achieved, and laughed out of town in all the other cases. They certainly wouldn't be given a bigger soap box, a following of brainwashed bigots who couldn't find the truth if you rammed it up their collective retentive asses, and a war chest of millions of dollars from the lunatic asylum masquerading as a news organization and a supposedly legitimate political party that now represents the south, the Mormon corridor, and Maine (for some insane reason I have yet to figure out).

But just for a moment, I'm going to stop typing, chase the squirrel away from the bird feeder again, and fantasize about a society in which we all get to vote on Sarah Palin's "level of productivity in society" and, based on our vote, determine that she should have to spend the rest of her years in seclusion, in some sort of God-forsaken hell-hole where news cameras never go, where health care is only for the very rich or very poor or very old or very incarcerated, and where her monthly check from the government is the majority of her income, where she has to live, with her whole damn genetically challenged family and unmarried teenage mother daughter, on $600 in food stamps a month, while borrowing money from friends and family to pay the rent...

Ah, fantasy...

What to do with that 401k...

You are the steward of your 401k. After Enron, I warned everyone I knew that these people were playing fast and loose with the rules. Sure, Phil Gramm got a few things through in the late 90's but once the Bush free marketeers got into it, it was just nuts. I think Goldman Sachs was leveraged 33 to one for god's sake. Hank Paulson him self got the SEC to change the rules that he took advantage of, and then when he became treasury secretary, basically bailed himself out.

You don't have to be a genius to know if you pile up a bunch of money and don't pay anyone to guard it, it will disappear. The Bushies did this with cold hard cash they sent to Baghdad on pallets! Billions if cash right from the US Treasury. Then, they did it 1000 times bigger with credit default swaps and unregulated insurance instruments. The average 401k guy gets told to buy and hold, the long run is good, stay in stocks if you're young, yada yada yada... Meanwhile, they're pocketing your money, buying jets and private islands in countries with no extradition, no income tax, and no minimum wage.

Just imagine what would have happened if we fed this GOP genetic mutation our social security funds.

So, is the 401k a bad thing? Should you be buying in right now? Well, you can get some good stuff cheap right now. But the next time you smell a bubble, put it in a money market fund. I wish people had the option of just going into an index fund with no fees. In the long run, that's better than all that damn day trading anyway. But who knows... It could be Mad Max world soon, in which case you'll want to invest in sharp boomerangs and gasoline.

Conservative Catharsis: Don't Blame Obama

There are no principles left on the right, only tactics and bluster, as if John Bolton himself has taken over the GOP diplomacy wing. At this point, looking back on all the facts I collected at this site, which proves conclusively that the entire Bush administration committed treason, repeatedly: I don't really care what they say. When you say as much shit as the right wing has said in the last few decades, it renders your speech meaningless. We are for x except when we're not. We're against y except when we're not. Now we're going to do that which we told you not to. Then we're going to tell you not to again.

I often tell myself I could be a better conservative than them. It wouldn't be hard. I have libertarian bones, like most Americans. We want the government to protect us and leave us alone, that delicate balancing act that, in a world of nanotechnology, is going to get harder and harder to perform. But it's really not that tricky. Conservatives should be reality based, do what would actually make us safer (which is more like Ron Paul's position than John Bolton's).

They should not be afraid of logic which leads to a conclusion similar to Dennis Kucinich. The liberal left and the reasonable right have much more in common than most of them would care to admit. If the Nationalist Times could get over its racism, they'd have some decent solutions about some things, like keeping government out of medical decisions, a position long held by the libertarian liberals on issues like abortion, medical marijuana, and euthanasia.

But first, the conservatives of the US need a catharsis: George W Bush ruined this country. Rush Limbaugh may be hoping Obama fails at big-government rescue, but it's really too late. George W. Bush (aided amply by Dick Cheney and Rush) drove this country right off a cliff, and Obama is trying to stitch together a big enough parachute to save the whole car. It's probably too late to save the car. But it is not too late to save those occupants who are willing to start stitching their own little parachutes, and we can wind up falling a little slower with a contraption that's going to look a little like the seagulls James lassoed to carry his giant peach.

We'll probably still have a hard landing, but maybe we can slow it all down enough to not break our legs when we hit. All the "conservatives" -- and I would argue that there really aren't many any more -- who can't realize that they were wrong about Bush, wrong about Iraq, wrong about Cheney, wrong about trickle down economics, and wrong about practically every social issue from Terry Schiavo to Sodomy, are going to have to crash. Continuing on at this point as if George Bush wasn't the worst president ever, as if Dick Cheney doesn't belong in prison, as if Donald Rumsfeld doesn't deserve to be "sleep deprived" for days, is the intellectual equivalent of a quivering bowl of decomposed fruit with ditto head flies swarming around it.

If I were a conservative right now (and in many ways I am), I would be encouraging bigger investment in infrastructure that will make our communities more resilient. I would be encouraging micro-loans to the poor to help them start small local businesses. I would demand that food stamp programs only get increases if the recipients can use that money at farmer's markets and on community supported agriculture programs. I would strongly encourage small, local power producers, and companies that create on site energy creation, especially in rural areas.

If I were a conservative right now, I would strongly encourage people to grow their own food in organic victory gardens or urban rooftop gardens, or community gardens on empty lots, like they're doing in Detroit now. The roots of the conservative philosophy lie in independence. This disaster brought on by the insolent teenager of a president and his Dr. Strangelove sidekick offers a chance for conservatives to get back to their roots and encourage the people of this country to become independent, to help each other, and to reward behavior that makes things better, while punishing those who make it worse.

Today's LA Times has a great story about the Mad Maxing that's going on right now, in this case at abandoned construction projects around southern California.

At its Oakland site, structures dating to World War II were to have been demolished by now to make way for 1,000 homes and a shopping center.

But workers walked off the job when their payments stopped, leaving behind piles of debris. A nine-story hospital the developers planned to raze was invaded by squatters.

In the Sacramento River Delta area of Contra Costa County at SunCal's planned Delta Coves housing development, blowing sand is filling in a new lagoon, and crucial water pumping systems are unmonitored.

Eight years of robber barons in charge has left us in a world we are much more equipped to deal with than many think. One of the facts (I know, conservatives, it's hard to get used to the idea that there are facts to be found outside of Fox News) that LA Times story touches on is that the thieves who show up in these abandoned construction projects are there to take copper wire and other commodities that are valuable. These people have been watching the robber barons do this to the whole country for the last 8 years. They are watching now as they all get away with it. And while there may not be a Wall Street worth plundering ever again, there will be things that aren't tied down. And unless those things are protected by armed guards, they will be stolen. In the Mad Max world Bush has left us with, people are left on their own to survive with whatever they can find.

We have the know-how and where-with-all to create resilient communities that produce their own power, grow their own food, and live sustainably without oil or coal. We just have to get used to the idea that we've been robbed. We have to start over, from scratch, with very little to help us besides government and abandoned industries to supply scraps. To what extent a federal government will be able to help a system that needs a lot of independent nodes, we will see. One reason I've chosen to not become a conservative is that I believe the government can help.

But it's going to need some basic conservative help, or it can easily get out of control. Hopefully, there are some conservatives willing to step up to a podium, admit that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Limbaugh conservatism is over. Bombastic, disagreeable, authoritarian, top-down, imperialistic, interventionist assholes are going to have to step aside and shut the hell up for a while. They had 8 years to do what they assured us was the absolute right thing to do, and it turned out they were lying, torturing thieves who literally stole billions of dollars (in deregulated Ponzi schemes, or by taking pallets of cash directly out of the US Mint and flying it to Baghdad where it disappeared). Any talk of government spending being out of control is just more of the same shit that trickled down their legs since Reagan. This government is going to spend on infrastructure and people, and the most the conservatives can hope to do is direct some of it in ways that they prefer.

The conservative in me would like to see the investments lead to more independence and less centralization. Is there any principal more important to conservative philosophy? At this point, it seems more likely that President Obama will preserve that principle more than the GOP will.